It's crazy similar to Game Dev Story, but it's much bigger in scope and variety. It scratches the same itches that game does, at the very least. It's neat if you follow the industry enough to understand its references. I think it's worth $8.

I found it to be fun at first, but once I realized how rigidly structured the systems in the game were, it lost much of its entertainment value. The list of bizarre, arbitrary, and downright frustrating design decisions is long and disappointing.

You create a game, pick themes from a list, adjust sliders on design elements that you don't quite know the impact they will have, hire staff with sets of skills, and at the end of the cycle you debug, release the game and it seems a bit like a dice roll if it's a success or a dud. I presume once you've played the game a few times you start to understand what characteristic to pick for which type of game, and which combination of themes work well together. It seems to me like part of way to be successful is to reverse engineer the right choices to make or go on a wiki and find all the answers to ruin your fun. Either way, didn't seem work putting time into this. I tried Game Dev Story on Android, and it felt very similar. If you have a tablet, might as well try that one to get your Tycoon fix.